


The Mystery of Madeline

by Yaoi_Hands



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Human/Vampire Relationship, LGBTQ Female Character, Lesbian Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:34:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24782383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yaoi_Hands/pseuds/Yaoi_Hands
Summary: Zoe's life starts to unravel as she enters into an affair with a vampire.
Kudos: 20





	The Mystery of Madeline

The first night when I called Sophie and said I had car trouble, and that I was waiting for Triple-A, I had no idea. I was delirious. What I was feeling then wasn’t love, it was the distillation of infatuation. I ached and sweated hormones and she made me flustered, and my words ripped from an old black & white movie, but when she smiled about it, I was drowned in warm syrup. Her lips were wide, and her smile was huge. I’m running into it again, and I’m still not ready to describe her. I don’t know how to, really. I can list her physical characteristics – tall, slim, freckles, naturally curly hair which had been professionally straightened. Still, what does that tell you?

I’ll instead say what it was like to be with her that first night, and how she made me feel about myself. I’ve never cheated on a girlfriend before, and considered myself a superior person because of it, but I was just vain and shallow. I’d never met a girl hotter than the one I was with. Sophie was the total package – gymnastics in college (national finals with UCLA) and sweet genes (her mom was the very definition of MILF and I’d tease Sophie about it). She was all set up with a tight body and a pretty face, and she knew all the tricks to make it a gorgeous face. And she loved me, too, which was a good bonus. I never thought I’d cheat on her because I figured she was just my type, until I met someone else in the Texaco that refined my type. When she finally dragged her eyes away from my ass, we started talking, me flirting on reflex, she just playing with her food.

“People often get distracted by my ass and miss that I have pretty eyes and a nice smile, too.”

“Plus, your ass is smart enough to get a GED. Your ass should be proud, because now it can go to technical school.”

“My ass looks too good to bother with school. It’s going to find a sugar mama to take care of it.”

“Well she can keep looking, because this mama is down to her last spoonful.”

“If you think any self-respecting stockbroker with my classic Greta Garbo looks is gonna let a damsel in distress go home with a twelve-pack of that piss-weak domestic beer, then you’re crackers, lady.”

“Are you buying me a drink, miss?”

“I’m buying you a dozen. It’ll cause me pain to know you went home with that crap.”

So, I bought the milk I came in for, and a twelve-pack of something imported. Funny, I can remember the exact Bogie VS Bacall spiel we said to each other, but I don’t remember the brand of beer I bought her, even though I ended up drinking most of it. Somehow, as we chatted, she let slip that her car was broken down – she nodded to the old Volvo in the parking lot. And somehow, I offered to give her a ride home. And somehow, I called Sophie and told her a lie about breaking down, and that I was waiting on the tow truck and, no, that she should go to sleep and that I’d catch a cab home. I thought I’d kept my voice down, but when I got into the Navigator, she was smiling, and said “So you don’t want your lady to know you’re driving another girl home? You’ve already got a guilty mind.”

She played with my CD’s while giving me directions to her place. Feeding Wreck Your Life by The Old 97’s into the stereo and playing Victoria. She lived in a condo near North Sheridan in Rogers Park. Not a great area. Sort of rundown, but not so bad that the dealers were selling on the corners. It looked like a place where students lived.

She got out, and sort of bit her lip in a way that did funny things in my chest and pants. “You want to make sure I get inside alright?”

I got out, and walked around the Navigator to where she stood, just outside a pool of light cutting down from the buzzing sodium streetlamp above. I stood in the light, and squinted to where she stood, chewing my lip now. She smiled at me again, and the stars came down like wasps and circled around in her eyes, and stung me on the face, prickly heat. I took a long-ragged breath, and I stepped into the dark too.

It seemed like a student place on the inside too. Dishes piled up and overflowing in the sink. Empty pizza boxes, beer cans. Some wine bottles in the trash. There were baskets of clean clothes that made me twitch, thinking about the wrinkles. She put the beer in the fridge, coming back into the living room where I hovered. She handed me one and held the other. We stood there. I glanced at the couch, seeing the pair of boxers with cowboys on them, and said, “Roommate?”

She was so good, she even looked embarrassed, “Sorry! Ex-boyfriend. Messy breakup.”

“Literally.”

“Yeah, I’ve been so slammed I haven’t had the chance to clean up. Ignore anything related to football, NASCAR, or ultimate Frisbee.”

“No problem. I might trip over something though... that’s a lot to ignore. I won’t be able to see half the room.”

“There’s your ass being witty again. Sit it down here and tell me about you.”

So, I sat where she’d made space for me on the couch, and she dropped onto the other end, pulling up her legs. I paused. I thought about what I was doing here. About Sophie at home, waiting for me to get back. I worked the words around in my mouth a little before letting them out, and as I started talking, I slipped a hand in my pocket and turned the ringer on my phone off. I told her about growing up in Charleston, and then coming to Chicago for school, and just sticking around. I talked about my job with Bell and Price and moved on when her eyes started to glaze when I let slip some trading jargon. I told her my folks had split up after I moved out, and that they’d just been waiting for me to leave so they could make it official, as if I didn’t notice the savage cold war that lasted from my 8th birthday to my 18th. I didn’t tell her about Sophie until she asked.

“You lied to your girlfriend about driving me home.”

“Yeah.”

“And then you came inside.”

“I did.”

“You must care about her, to lie to her like that. You hit just the right note too. I’m sure she believed you.”

“I guess. Tell me about you. How come you’re so fascinating that I’m risking a two year mostly-happy thing to drink beer while sitting on your ex-boyfriend’s shorts?”

“I have a secret, and if you guess it, I’ll give you a kiss.”

Funny thing is, when I said it, it was totally spontaneous. I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t believe it, of course. I was just spouting shit, trying to sound clever. I mean, I’d been watching one of the late-night skin-flick channels the night before and creamed to this one movie about a hot vampire chick. She actually looked surprised when I said it. A first, she just stared at me, eyes a little wide. Then she smiled. One of those smiles you see with your eyes, but you feel down in your crotch. She came at me across the couch slow, but there was a rigidity and power in her limbs, yet her trespass across the boxer-strewn DMZ between us was smooth, like she was moving on rails, and for a moment, I was repelled. The domino falls of stupid decisions that had brought me here registered for a second. I almost pulled away. Almost. She said, “You made it too easy!” And, I thought, “I was only kidding.”

I haven’t fucked like that since I was 17 and pumped to the eyeballs with hormones and late adolescence. I didn’t hold back, and I wasn’t kind. I didn’t try any of my kung-fu at all - all the little secrets and tricks, I’d picked up from the girls I’d dated, or the articles in Cosmo I’d read. I’d worked her jeans off, but didn’t bother with the shirt or sweater, just pushing my hand under to paw at her tits while I fingered her with the other and kissed her. She was doing the same to me. I’d blow, and then in seconds I’d be ready to rock again, and back between her long thighs.

She was cold at first, cold inside, but then she lit up like a blown ember, glowing hot and she started to gasp and sweat along with me. She squeezed me so hard against her, I thought she was going to crack my shoulder blade, and then she was biting at me, and I felt her teeth rake my shoulder, and then my neck. She bit, and I thrusted my fingers savagely into her, and her teeth slipped and tore across my skin, until finally she locked them down on me, and wouldn’t shake loose, and I knew, I fucking knew what she was doing, and what she was, and that I’d named her right with my smartass comment, and fuck me and damn my fucking soul, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all. Then we switched positions.

For a while, I just floated, my face between her legs, and hers between mine. I felt totally spent. She stirred, and it snapped me out of the post-sex fugue long enough for me to realize my head was swimming, and I felt like I was about to puke. She let me stumble into the bathroom and lock the door. I wanted to splash cold water on my face, but fumbled it and turned the hot on instead, and I couldn’t get the knobs figured out. I slumped down in a pile and pressed my forehead against her toilet for the coolness, and then my nerves ran in reverse, and I was shaking and freezing. I wrapped her big rough towels around me and curled up on the bathmat. She left me alone for a few minutes, before knocking hesitantly on the door, a little “hey, is everything OK?” knock, like I was taking too long crapping and she needed to pee. I tried to say that it wasn’t, but my teeth were chattering, and I felt sick before another wash of skin-burning heat came over me, and I pressed my face to the tile floor for relief. She twisted the door handle, and I heard a ping as the cheap interior lock broke. “Hey,” she said, “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but I’ve really got to get some sleep, so could you head out? I’ll call you a cab, because you don’t look so good.”

Understatement. With her help, I stood, and checked myself in the mirror. She’d bitten me all over my shoulder and thighs, and from the smeared blood, it looked bad, but when I washed it off, was mostly superficial. No classic Dracula-style twin pinpricks, anyway. It looked like a dog chewed on me though, and it stung like hell. I held the sink until my head stopped swimming, and her image in the mirror smeared and blurred, and so I shook my head to clear it. I said, “I don’t know if I can get home like this.” “Of course not. You’re naked. You’d freeze your tits off, and you need those girls.”

“I mean, I don’t know if I can stay upright long enough.”

“The cab’s on the way. I’ll fix your truck, so it won’t start and get it towed for you. Do you have a mechanic?”

I told her, and she said, “I made you some scrambled eggs. You need to get your strength back, soldier.” My stomach did one backflip, and then growled. I dug my clothes out of the wrecked couch. I didn’t even want to think about what they smelled like. Worry about that later. I ate the eggs off a paper plate, and she handed me my phone. “I put my number in under ‘mechanic’ just in case you have any more car trouble.”

The cab honked from the parking lot, and I gave her the Navigator key. We had an awkward moment then, not knowing how to end it, and finally she knocked the paper plate and scrambled eggs out of my hand onto the floor, and kissed me, and bit my lower lip so hard she broke the skin. I stumbled out, and then turned realizing there was something I hadn’t asked. “Wait, what’s your name?” But the door was already closed.

I fell asleep in the cab, and the driver had to wake me up when we got to my place. I paid him with a fifty and didn’t wait for change. I wasn’t thinking too clear, and my head was trying to float away. I thought about all the sweat and sex all over me. So, I jumped in the complex’s pool, and the shock made all the air in my lungs exit my body, and it woke me the fuck up. I splashed around a little, and crawled out, soaked and now shaking with cold. As I was fumbling with my keys, the door opened. Sophie, in a thick robe. I watched her face transform - pissed, shocked, then worried, and she was reaching out and pulling me inside. “Zoe! Oh God, what happened?!” I mumbled about breaking down... about getting attacked by a dog... about falling into the pool. It was total shit, but I was obviously wrecked. A shower, a cup of tea, and into bed with Sophie where I shivered all night.

Her body was too hot to touch, and I jerked awake again and again whenever she’d brush against me. The edge of her arm against my chest felt like someone put an electric iron on me and pushed the steam button. In the morning, after she went to work (I called in, but insisted she go. I promised I’d go to the doctor, but I didn’t). When she’d been gone for an hour, I got out my phone and scrolled down my contacts to ‘Mechanic’ and I left this message. “What happened last night? Call me.” Around seven that evening, I got a text. HEY. WONDERED IF YOU’D CALL. STILL GOT 10 BEERS. BOY, COULD USE HELP FINISHING THEM. -mad. I boggled a little at the tag. What was she mad about? But I was just slow. It was her sig.

I started seeing her once or twice a week. As much as I could make an excuse to be working late or having a drink with the gang from work, or friends from out of town. I worked with a guy named Mitchell who picked up on the thing instantly, like he had a radar for cheating. He started talking to me while we were smoking one day. “Getting some strange on the side, Zoe?”

“You’ve got no fucking idea how much strange I’m getting.”

“You double-tapped it yet? Hit the sneak pussy, and gone home and tapped your steady’s ass? If you could pull that shit, you’d be the poon ninja.”

“I thought Andy was the poon ninja because he slept with that temp girl and then hooked up with her mom later.”

“If you get the double-tap, you will strip him of his title. Zoe, you absolutely have to do this now.”

“As if my life weren’t complicated enough.” I ashed it, flicked it away, and hit him with my shoulder as I turned so he’d drop his cig. “Fuck, dude!” (I was just like one of the guys) Mitchell wouldn’t rat me out, but it irritated me how transparent my excuses were to him. Sophie seemed to buy it, but I knew she suspected. I was so spent after “working late” or on a “night out with the gang”. I’d swish with some scotch and rub a little on my neck, so she’d think I was just had too wasted or something, but the sick truth I’d never speak out loud was that Sophie didn’t do it for me anymore. I could fake everything but the sex with her, and that just wasn’t happening anymore. I was going to break it off with her. I’d decided it one night while pretending to sleep with my back to Sophie who was pretending to sleep. Things were rough at work. I’d been off my game and starting to stick out. Mitchell would crack on me whenever he got the chance, especially when I kicked his ass at pool when I joined the guys from the office for a legit night out.

“You’re stretched too thin, Zoe. Too many obligations. In Tibet, they know how to fuck without blowing all their sexual energy or some shit. You, my friend, need to retain some Chi.” All the other guys had heard about my failure to double-tap, and Mitchell got the laugh he was looking for, so I took fifty bucks off him on the next three games. But he was right. It was fucking up my life.

So, I came by Mad’s place after work later that week, intent on breaking it off, but when I got there, she was sitting at the coffee table with a little girl. The kid was drawing with crayons, and Mad was helping her. She smiled and introduced me to her little sister. The kid’s name was Judy and looked to be about nine. I said, “That’s a pretty name.” Because what the fuck do you say to a kid in this situation? The kid said, “Are you my sister’s girlfriend?” I said that I was. And I couldn’t break up with her then, could I? With the kid looking on? Mad made burgers on her little Foreman grill, but she and Judy had already eaten, she said. When things started sparking between us, it made me uncomfortable, the kid sitting there, drawing away, so I was happy to let Mad lead me when she and I started to tumble towards the bedroom, and my head started throbbing with anticipation. I huffed “What about your sister?” And she said, “She’ll color while we’re... in the bedroom.” It was really hot that time, because we were trying to keep quiet. I bit her arm to keep from groaning when she bit into me, and I thought a shadow flickered under the closed bedroom door, like someone was listening there, but I soon forgot about that. Later, when I started to stumble out, her little sister handed me something. She looked up at me and her eyes were bigger than the whole world. “I made you a drawering” she said. This is what Mad’s little sister gave me: a stick figure woman with vampire fangs holding onto another female stick figure Mad and me?

When we fucked now, it was less harsh than before, less raw than the first time. I paced myself, and so did she, so I didn’t end up a rag doll, and I could drive myself home alright. It all seemed... I don’t know. Almost routine. I’d lie, I’d go to her place, we’d screw. I’d wash, rinse, and then repeat. People can get used to anything. People stay with monsters who hold their hands on the stove or beat their teeth out. My Dad was a cop, and he had a thousand stories like that. Some woman, stomped half to death by her methed-up shitbag boyfriend, would go after the cops hauling the guy off. The one-time Dad got hurt on the job, it was because a sixty-year-old woman hit him in the head with a cast-iron skillet because they were arresting the man who’d broken her nose for the tenth time. Love is a fucked up thing, and that’s how I knew things were really done with Sophie, because I would never have let her bite me and claw at my back, and mess with my head like Mad did. I looked at myself in the mirror, and saw the lines forming at the corners of my eyes, and I thought, “This has to be love. Why the fuck else would I endure this?” I know what she was doing to me. I knew she was drinking my blood. Fuck, that was hard to write. She was DRINKING MY BLOOD. But it wasn’t that fucked up. Or it didn’t seem that fucked up then. In college, I dated this psycho girl who still lived at home, and we ended up sleeping over at her house just about every night and screwing like sea otters even though her mom was right next door. We’d have breakfast together. And I knew the situation was fucking weird for everyone involved. I knew it was sort of fucked up. But somehow, it was also normal. The blood thing was like that. It got normal. It was just something we did, and it wasn’t even the kinkiest thing I’d ever done either. And on some level, I just wasn’t putting it all together. I’d named her for what she was, but I didn’t have a goddamn clue what that really meant. I thought she was a girl with a kink, and the best lay I’d ever had, and I didn’t know different until I saw her kill Mitchell with her bare hands.

She said, “Let’s go out.” I was taken aback. I lifted my face from between her legs and looked up at her.

“Out?”

“Let’s go dancing. I want to move tonight.”

“We usually move a fair bit when we stay in...”

She pulled me up gently with a handful of my hair. “First we dance, and then we fuck.” We got dressed up. She’d bought me clothes. Not my usual thing at all, but when I put them on and let her mess up my hair artfully with gel, I had to admit I looked pretty good. She shimmied into a sheath dress that looked like it was made from skinned mermaids. She did a couple of things to her hair and threw on some FM shoes that gently kicked my libido over and over, keeping it from dozing off. And so attired, we went to a place called Five Alive. It was trying for this post-irony glam-fun thing splashed liberally in all the colors found in a pack of Skittles. The waitresses mingling trays of Jell-O shots had Ziggy Stardust eyes. The music was sugary and peppy, like a puppy on meth. The place made Mad laugh and laugh, and she poured two shots of Goldschläger down me, before dragging me out onto the dance floor where we tore the place up. She moved like the music was in her blood, and her blood was moving her so fast that between the strobes she seemed to teleport. She was so good, I looked good dancing with her.

I felt charged, and the crowd moved with her, like everyone was dancing backup. They watched us, and I could tell the guys wished they were me. Some of the girls, too. She got me throbbing, like I had a full body hard-on, and slowly the room faded until it was just she and I, and the music, and...Fucking Mitchell. Yelling over the music, he leaned in right into my space and I nearly punched him in the balls I was so pissed he got close when I was this charged up.

“Dude, holy shit Dude! Fucking primo, Dude!” The spell was broken. Mad came over.

“Mad, this is Mitchell. He’s one of the assholes I work with.”

“Hey Asshole! Are you fucked up yet?”

“Zoe, this bitch is awesome! Let’s get fucked up!” It was like she changed frequencies and was suddenly sending and receiving on 103.9 FM THE MITCH. We ended up in a corner booth, and Mad kept waving for more drinks. Mitchell pounded shot after shot, and then, “I got to tap a kidney! Zoe, don’t let her get ahead of me - I’m two shots down as it fucking is!”

She turned and said to me, “He IS an asshole. I’ve got to piss too. Back in a tick.” And she kissed me on the bridge of my nose, and god damn, was it nice watching her sway away through the crowd, just to see her ass move in that dress. And I waited. Might have been a line to piss. I waited some more. A long line. I waited some more and decided to go looking for them. I tried the handle on the women’s toilet, and it was locked. From inside, I heard Mitchell’s slurred voice, “Bitch, yeah! Here it is! Fucking here it is!” And Mad’s voice too, indistinct, and I fucking lost it.

I threw my shoulder against the door one, two, three, and the latch gave and... It was exactly as bad as you could possibly imagine. Her, up on the sink, dress pushed up, him, pants around his ankles, working his shorts down, and fuck no wonder he pissed without holding his dick. It was like a third leg. But hell, that wasn’t anything. I could deal with that. I deserved to see that after what I was doing to Sophie three times a week. No, it was what she was doing, her eyes wide and hungry, mouth opened, and about...to...bite....

“Fuck no! You do not fucking do that with him! Not with him!” I plowed into him, and we went over in front of the stalls in the piss splatter, and I clipped my head on the wall going down. He was crazy with lust, like a rampant bull, and he made the most of my dazed flopping. He roared at me, I don’t think he even recognized me, and then he brought his fist down like a hammer on my face, once, twice. Three... no. Not three. I opened my eyes, and she was behind him, holding his wrist, and his hand wasn’t moving. I tried to look at her, but something was unleashed in the room, and it tore at the air, and at my mind. I must have been a little concussed, but still, she was a fury unleashed, inhuman. She scared the fuck out of me, and then she grabbed Mitchell by the face and drove his head into the toilet with a sickening force. It reminded me of crash-test dummy videos. No human hand could exert power like that, and it smashed in Mitchell’s skull, and he fell flopping next to me. He convulsed and drummed his heels and said, “Guh! Guh! Guh! Guh!” in jerky bursts, like a bleating animal. Then she reached down, cradling his head in her hands, and she twisted slowly like she was unscrewing a bottle. There was a sharp wet pop, and then Mitchell didn’t move anymore. She stood and stumbled back, pushing the hair out of her face, and the sight of her cut a gouge through me, made me want to rush to her, and protect her.

It also hit me in the cooch with a wave of warm lust. I wanted to throw her down and have her next to Mitchell’s body. I didn’t do either. I stood up. I said, “What the fuck? What the fuck?” And she said, “We have to do something about this! We have to get him out of here! Oh fuck, oh fuck, I’m in so much fucking trouble if they find him.” The way she said it, I knew she didn’t mean the cops. I went to the door, and jammed my foot against it lest someone stumble in. Just in time, too. It rattled and pushed against my foot. I said, “Clean him up! And... fuck, we’ll carry him out between us like he’s drunk. We need to fix his head somehow. Just good enough to get back to the car.” And so, I watched her cleaning up the blood, and tying a bandana made from a strip off the bottom of my shirt around his head. I watched her pass in front of the mirror over and over, and saw the warped reflection she cast, the smeared face, indistinct. We got him between us, one arm over each of our shoulders, and that’s how we left Five Alive with the corpse of Mitchell the asshole.

She drove the Navigator, Mitchell in the back with the golf clubs I hadn’t used in weeks, and I took Mitchell’s red Corvette. We screamed at each other on our phones while we drove. “What the fuck are we going to do with a corpse, Mad? What are we going to do with him?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! Stop yelling at me!”

My fury and fear were loose though, and I couldn’t see her, and somehow it was easy to let out and I screamed abuse at her until the weeping coming through the phone snapped me out of it. Over and over, she was wailing “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I fucked it all up. I’m sorry!” The road was dark, and I pulled over, and saw in the rearview she was pulling over behind me. I got out, and so did she, and in the Navigator’s headlights, we slammed together, and I held her, and she screamed with her face pressed into my neck, but she didn’t bite me. She just howled the way people do at Italian funerals. She shook and was so scared. In a little bit, she pulled away and was a little better. I kissed her once, softly. She touched my face. I said, “I have an idea.”

We circled back towards town, and when we got to the right spot, put Mitchell in his Vet, and jammed the gas with his shoe, and then popped it into gear, sending him roaring down Western Avenue so he clipped the bridge embankment, and then over-ended into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The water was achingly cold. It would screw up the cops figuring a time of death. He’d be smashed up from being bounced around in the car. He was drunk as shit, and still had most of his blood inside him. A tragic fucking accident. We got back to her place, and it was nearly five in the morning. I had half a dozen messages on my phone from Sophie, and I ignored them. I helped Mad inside, and we took a shower together with the water as hot as it would go, and I cried then, and she held me then. We stumbled into her bedroom, and she said, “Stay with me? Through the day?” I said I would. She said, “I’ll fall asleep, but it won’t really be like sleep. You won’t be able to wake me up, or it’ll be really hard. It’s... “

“I know. I get it now.”

“But I’ll know you’re here, so please stay.”

“I will.” I knew when the sun came up because of how she shook, gently. Curled up, forehead to forehead, her wet hair plastered across both our faces, I couldn’t miss it. She took a long slow breath, let it out. And stopped breathing. She became utterly still, unmoving, like a corpse on a slab. I watched her lights go out, and felt the rise of panic, because it was like watching someone you love die. Fuck, “like it”. That’s what it was. Then, I saw the faint motion under her eyelids, like she was dreaming. I squeezed her closer. I whispered, “I love you.” And she shook again, her legs twitching with the ghost of running, and she gave a faint, high whimper. I thought she was asleep then. She wasn’t, though - suddenly, maybe a minute later, all her little movements and noises and things just... stopped. Like she was dead.

I guess she was. After that it just wasn’t right anymore. Something was lost between us. Twist my arm, I’d tell you she’d lost something. She was just a little more distant. Her smile, just a little slower in coming. And when she’d look at me, there was just a touch more of that frightening raw hunger. I couldn’t forget the thing that had been unleashed when Mitchell had tried to beat my face in. She knew that too, and that was part of it. Mitchell was fucking things up for me from beyond the grave. About a month later, after taking a week off and ignoring her texts and messages, I went back to her place. I’d been trying to patch things up with Sophie. We’d become roommates, really. We hardly saw each other, and she had to know I was fucking around on her, but when she looked at me it was with pity rather than anger. She sensed something wrong with me. That whatever I was mixed up in, it was making me miserable.

I honestly can’t believe she stuck it out, but her Dad was a shit who used to beat on her and her Mom, so it might have been some kind of cycle of abuse thing, or something worse, like her still loving me, and caring that I was circling the bowl. But after a week, I went back to Mad. I should have called first. I knocked, and nobody answered, and I was going to leave when the door opened, and it was her little sister. I started to say something, but she held her finger up to her lips and shushed me. I followed her in, and she pointed to the bedroom and stabbed at her neck with two fingers, curved like fangs. Then waggled her eyebrows, then stuck out her tongue and made a gross-out face. I felt nothing. None of the jealous rage I felt when I saw her with Mitchell. I knew she had to be seeing someone else. I knew the blood wasn’t just a kink. Still, I should have felt something.

Her little sister pointed at the papers scattered on the table, and pointed to the crayons, and then to the couch. I sat and started to draw with her. I drew two stickwomen standing by a black river. The little girl looked at it and nodded. She showed me her drawing, and it was the woman from the first drawing she’d made for me, this time she was punching a man in the face and the word balloon above him said, “PUNCH!” I looked at her and raised my eyebrows, and she held up one finger for “Wait”... one second... two seconds... three seconds... she nodded, and lowered her hand, and from Mad’s bedroom someone started to wail and cry, and then I heard a man’s voice, deep and rough, “Fucking bitch! What the fuck!” I was through the door, the kid’s papers scattering behind me. Flash of light from the open door. I took it in. The dude was huge. He matched the Harley I saw in the parking lot the way two puzzle pieces mach to make a complete picture. He was bleeding from his neck, and had one hand clutched there, the other shading his eyes from the sudden brightness. She... she was huddled back from him, in the corner, bearded in blood, chest and tits covered like she was hemorrhaging from her mouth. But of course, none of it was hers. She was crying and yelling, “No! No!” He was trying to threaten and yell and curse all at the same time, and it came out all smeared, just round noise.

Snap, Snap, Snap, I took it in like a paparazzi clicking pictures, and slammed my elbow into the side of his head with my whole body behind it. It fired a spike of pain, numbness and tingling nerves all the way to my fingers, but he went down, and I followed like riding a falling tree. Big, but he was hurt. I knew the weakness he was feeling, the sick dizziness. When the adrenaline hit him too, he had no coordination. I drove my elbow down over and over into his face, sparing myself a broken hand. I don’t think my Dad would believe what his little girl was doing with the little bit of self-defense he taught me. When he quit moving, his face was a mess. Split and bleeding. My arm was fucked up too, and I’d chipped some bone pounding into his skull. I heaved, sucking air hard, and swayed to my feet. From the door, a snort of derision, and the kid turned her back and went back to the table, and her crayons. I went to Mad, and crouched down before her, and she clutched at me and it hurt. I ended up with the biker’s blood all over my shirt. When she calmed down, she wouldn’t tell me what was going on. She just showered, and then found a new shirt for me in the wreckage of the place and told me she’d take care of the biker. I told her I couldn’t let her kill him. She said she wouldn’t. She promised. I left. When I came back the next night, she was gone.

I called her a hundred times, and got nothing, and then got a message that the number had been disconnected. I kept going to her condo, knocking so loud someone called the cops on me, and I told the cops to go fuck themselves, and then something broke loose inside me and I started screaming at them, and then weeping uncontrollably. I remember them trying to talk me down, and I looked down, and I had a length of decorative wrought iron rail that I’d yanked from beside her door. I screamed something about just wanting to talk to her, and then it felt like every muscle in my body clenched at once. One cop said to the other, “Is she down?” And the other one said, “Fucking nutjob. Taze her again.” They bounced me for a twenty-four-hour hold, and I ended up in the county psyche ward. I screamed until they narced me into a drooling zombie. It felt fucking great to have consciousness extinguished that way. To just be, without thought. When the hold expired, I saw the hollow-cheeked psych-nurse, and she asked me questions off a checklist. I gave the right answers. They cut me loose, with a court date for disturbing the peace. The cops were pretty cool about it, because they could have hit me with a felony resisting charge, but let it go. The two tazer burns on my back kept me from feeling too good about it though. I went home, and got some things together in a bag, and left the rest of it. Let Sophie sort it out, chuck it, keep it, sell it. I was done ruining her life. I just left, and never returned her calls. When my phone service got canceled because I didn’t pay the bill, I switched to prepaid and she never got the number.

I went back to Mad’s place a week after getting out. I went during the day, in brown shorts and a brown ball cap. I had a package. I talked to the property manager and said I had this package to deliver to Madeline North, but he said nobody by that name lived there, and nobody ever did. I showed him the address. Nope, not her. When I did a reverse lookup later on, the name listed for her condo was Dan Winder. I wondered if he wore boxers with cowboys on them. That night, I jumped the fence into the tiny backyard, and the sliding glass door was unlocked the way I remembered it always being. I let myself in and pulled around in the dark. All her stuff was gone, and I found the remnants of half a dozen guy’s clothes scattered here and there, different sizes, different styles. Some of it was mine, of course. Some of it I couldn’t make any sense of. I just didn’t know what to look for, so I grabbed some of this and some of that, stuffing it into a gym bag I found in her bedroom. I grabbed a bunch of her sister’s drawings from where they were taped to the fridge.

I finished the last beer from the twelve pack I’d bought her, ferreting it out from where it had hid behind a curdled gallon of ancient milk. I felt something itching in me while looking at the place too... the urge to clean it up and make it tidy. Somehow...order it. Make it make sense. I actually started straightening before I caught myself, and I left fast. That itching would only get worse, and it made me remember my Mom, and her vacuuming and her light switch ritual when she tucked us into bed. She’d touch the light switch three times, and then turn it off. According to the internet, obsessive compulsive spectrum disorders have a genetic link, and can be aggravated by stress. Of all the aberrations I’d picked up from Mad, the gnawing urge to impose order on my environment is perhaps the most benign. The worst has to be the observations I make now. It’s like porn. Looking at porn on the internet is so free and easy. Oh look, vagina! It’s like that with looking for vampires. You see one, and then, you start looking for more, and you see more, and you start looking for more, and eventually you end up sort of feeling disgusted with yourself, but...you always go back and look again. That’s how the observations are. I’ve reordered my life around making them. I work any job that comes along so I can make rent, feed myself, and track and catalog vampires. I’ve watched them, watched what they do to people. I’ve seen their hunger, naked and raw. I’ve seen it under layers of romance and affection.

I think that’s scarier, and it made me remember my first night with Mad, and that made me shake, and then I had to wash every piece of clothing I owned, and that meant twenty dollars in quarters for the crappy laundry machines in Daryl’s converted house, and that means I didn’t have grocery money that week, and that meant I stole people’s lunches and weight-loss shakes from the fridge at the office where I was temping as a file clerk. I even drank half the bottle of pumpkin spice holiday coffee creamer. Funny thing too - none of that made me feel desperate or out of control, but not knowing how many paperclips I had left in my paperclip holder drove me crazy, and I had to recount them over and over. When I took them, the meds smoothed things out, but they made my thoughts slippery, and I kept crying for no reason. And so here I am at the end of my story. I don’t have much else to say about it. I’ve just been making my observations, and keeping fit, and working, and putting together the Big Picture. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know how long I can keep doing this - something is going to snap, and I’ll end up back in County, or in jail, or on the street, or dead. I’m going to get noticed, watching the way I do. I’ve already had some close calls. But I know I’m not going to stop. I’m going to keep looking until I find her, or she finds me, or one of her cousins catches on to me, and...poof. I’m gone.


End file.
